Birkenstocks and Stetsons

I have spent all of my adult life in Maine, where there are only two kinds of people: Mainers and people from “away.” If you weren’t born in Maine, you’ll never be a Mainer, and I’ve even heard purists say that your parents have to be from the state to gain insider status. “Just because the cat has kittens in the oven don’t make em’ biscuits,” as the saying goes.

But by spending so much time detailing how a new generation of “green cowboys” differs from the old-timers, the reporter only perpetuates the stereotype. And in focusing only on newer sustainable cattle ranches, the magazine misses an opportunity to place new guys in their historical context, as members in a decades-long succession of progressive rangers.

The article begins by contrasting Zachary Jones, one of the new “green cowboys,” with the “stereotype of the Stetson-wearing cowboy.” Jones, we are told, does not wear denim, boots or a bandana. Nor does he ride around with a gun in the back of his pick-up truck.

Instead, he reads Wallace Stegner, wears “cargo pants, a stylish shirt with a Patagonia logo on the front and, most tellingly, Birkenstock sandals. You’d almost think he were heading to the monthly meeting of the men’s book club in Bozeman.”

This comparison, which is supposed to make readers think differently about ranchers, actually sets up the expectation that cowboys who like their Stetsons and rifles don’t care about the environment. But High Country News readers know that for decades, ranchers—and not just those with Birkenstocks—have been experimenting with environmentally-sound practices like rotational grazing and stream restoration.

In the late 1950s, a ten gallon hat-wearing Texan named Sid Goodloe bought an eroded, abused ranch in south-central New Mexico and embarked on a multi-decade quest to restore the ecosystem—and make a living. He was following the vision of Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean game warden whose holistic approach to cattle ranching inspired many western ranchers to ditch the open range in favor of regimented rotational grazing. Over the course of 40 years, Goodloe slowly brought native grasses back to the land, restored the watershed and creek on his property and increased the number of cattle the land could support.

Others have followed suit, including Oregon ranchers Doc and Connie Hatfield. Using similar techniques, the couple helped found the Country Natural Beef co-op, and began marketing their largely grass-fed, hormone and antibiotic-free beef in the mid 1980s. And in the late 1990s, environmentalists and ranchers in New Mexico teamed up to form the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes environmentally-friendly grazing techniques, ecosystem restoration and collaboration.

Courtney White, who co-founded Quivira, said he was pleased to see “green cowboys” in the mainstream media—although no one out West calls them that—because many people are unfamiliar with the practice. For him and his colleagues, however, the story was old news.

What is new, he says, is “the extension of this kind of ranching into grass-fed beef, into local food production.” More ranchers are raising their cattle entirely on grass, unlike some early adopters of rotational grazing, including the Hatfields, who finished their cattle at feedlots. But now, White is seeing more ranchers looking at grass-fed as a way of diversifying their income.

And they don’t all wear Patagonia. White says he works with sustainability-minded ranchers who “run the gamut from very traditional-looking to pony tails and ball caps.” The diversity, he says, is evidence that this style of ranching isn’t going away soon. “It’s a wide spectrum now, which is why it’s not a fad.”

“Out here, appearance has little to do with authenticity,” the Christian Science Monitor piece notes. If that’s the case, then let’s keep the focus on the work ranchers do, not what they wear.

More from Energy & Industry

As a seventh-grader with his first horse, I was excited to spend the summer working alongside Jim Freeman on his ranch near Faith, SD. Jim was an old cowboy. He'd started in Oklahoma, worked down and up through Texas, through New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. Somewhere along the way he picked up a wife. He would foreman, she'd cook and they saved their pennies and bought the ranch out in the middle of South Dakota. One day we were rattling in his old pickup along the two track between his ranch and his neighbor's. A smart-britched fourteen year old, I pointed out how much nicer the neighbor’s new heard of white-faced Herefords looked than Jim’s, “He’ll get a better price at auction than you will!” Jim let the pickup roll to a stop, “Take another look at my place and look at his. Tell me what you see?” “I see a lot prettier herd over on his place.”“Yes, they are. Sure are. How many?”“More than yours. Way more.”“Well, son, he bought all those fancy cattle and paid dear for them. He’s got to sell a lot to make his mortgage, so he has to have a lot to sell.”“So?”“So all his grass is et up, isn’t it? Is mine?”I looked and Jim was right. I stopped talking about then. Jim replaced the ever-present Bull Durham hanging from his lip, and put the truck in gear, “When you measure up a rancher, might pay to look at his grass before you look at his cattle, think?”That was in 1960. Ranchers with a conservation ethic have been around a long time, even before Aldo.